If you don’t yet understand the point of SEO, this article is for you.
Most small business owners now have the perception that they have to “do SEO” to get their websites onto the front page of Google, without really understanding what it involves. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, a technique that was developed to help our websites become easier to find on the Internet.
Google and other search engines have revolutionised the way we look for information. We type keywords into a search ‘box’, click Enter, and wait for the results to come up on the search engine results pages (SERP) – and in most cases there are tens or hundreds of pages of results to read. But we have become so used to getting almost instant results with Google that we have also lost the patience to sift carefully through information to find what we want. Most people will give up and try with new keywords if they can’t find what they are looking for by page 3 or 4 of Google.
So, not surprisingly, we all want our websites to reach the magic front page. But this is a tall order in a cyber-world populated by trillions of web pages.
SEO is not just about keywords
While you can indeed get a high ranking on Google if you use the right SEO techniques, it involves a complex process that does not produce overnight results. Many customers who ask their web developers for SEO think that it’s just a matter of putting in the right keywords, but it’s not that simple.
A range of technical measures must be implemented to ensure that search engines will ‘see’ a website, in other words, provide what Google is looking for.
Google sees everything
Once Google has found a new website, it will then evaluate its “credibility” by watching to see what happens on the site. Google measures things like:
- How many visits the site gets
- How long the visitors stay
- Which pages they visit
- Whether they like what they find there
- What new content has been published lately on the site
- Whether that content has value, and so on.
The more credible Google thinks the site is, the higher the rank it will give to that site.
Like a cyber Big Brother, Google sees it all – there’s nowhere to hide. And if your website does not measure up, Google will simply ignore it.
What’s more, to keep us on our toes and to maintain high levels of optimisation activity (which helps to sustain Google’s revenues) Google keeps changing its game with little technical tweaks which you have to keep up with if you want to avoid being ignored.
SEO is like share trading
For SEO providers, managing an SEO account is very similar to managing a share trading portfolio. They have to read the market, watch what’s going up or going down, who’s hedging, what’s moving, what’s not budging – and each day they have to tweak the portfolio, sell a bit here, add a bit there, get in there early or get out fast.
Also similar to share trading, it can take time for SEO to produce the desired results and give the client a return on his investment.
